A fortress of cinema and potatoes

Peñíscola offers the promise of great adventures at sea and the appeal of great vessels. Those who are always in the port, as Pessoa would like, "on the eve of never leaving." This town on the Castellón coast has undergone an extraordinary transformation in recent decades. Its original attraction, however, is intact: the small walled village located on a rocky tomb or peninsula where the famous castle of Papa Luna stands out. The old sand isthmus, its only mooring to the coast, easily flooded, now appears blurred: the construction of the port obviated its defensive singularity. A few kilometers away, we also find the Serra d'Irta Natural Park, one of the last unspoiled places in the Valencian Community.

Peñíscola, in fact, is a malformation of the original name of the town in Valencian / Catalan -

Peníscola

- by the intersection with the word “rock”. It comes from the vulgar Latin

paene insula:

almost island. Due to those strange vicissitudes of local politics, the authentic place name has only been official since 2008. The Peñiscolanos are seafarers, open to the world but, at the same time, reserved as inhabitants of an almost secret interior. Until the sixties, everything in this small town evoked a time stopped in an exasperating frugality subject to the not always graceful designs of fishing. This is how Joan Fuster portrayed his day-to-day life in an already classic travel book,

El País Valenciano

(1962): “Life in Peñíscola is humble and laborious. The alleys, pine trees and ravines, with cubic houses and without roofs - one would say imitated from the castle - are the most picturesque in the Valencian Country. At some corner, a group of women, barefoot and sitting on the ground, mending nets or weaving mesh. A couple of stalls with postcards and monographs await the tourist. The silence and the breeze are warm ”.

This place was changed by the cinema. In 1954 Luis García Berlanga, whose centenary we are now celebrating, filmed

Calabuch

(a fictitious name to refer to our town) here. The centuries-old seafaring existence of Peñíscola, however, was hardly altered. Everything changed seven years later, when Anthony Mann moved the blockbuster

El Cid here.

Then the miracle takes place: the small fishermen's stronghold begins its decisive transformation into a tourist empire. Neighbors take a liking to the job of being extras. From then until now, the

Peñiscolano

skyline

and its peculiar orography have often been seen on the big or small screen. Berlanga returned to the place to shoot his last breath,

Paris-Timbuktu

(1999), while all kinds of series

(El chiringuito de Pepe, The Ministry of Time

or

Game of Thrones)

chose their profiles to set juicy fictions.

Statue of Benedict XIII (The Pope Luna), by Sergio Blanco.

Jorge Tutor Alamy

Pontifical residence and tourist success

It is obvious that the fortress is one of its most peculiar attractions. Its construction was started by the Templars in the 13th century and from the 15th century the schismatic Pope Benedict XIII adopted it as a papal residence. It is the epoch of the Great Schism of the West, when an unofficial papacy arises before Rome in Avignon. The penultimate alternative pontiff was precisely Pedro Martínez de Luna (known as Papa Luna), who reigned calmly before the sea of ​​Peñíscola until his death in 1423 (at the age of 94), believing himself undoubtedly the authentic re-living successor of Saint Peter. After his ascent to the schismatic skies, his cardinals elected Gil Sánchez Muñoz as his successor, with the name of Clemente VIII. In 1429, however, Alfonso V of Aragon forced him to abdicate. The Schism of the West thus came to an end.

All this is part of the cultural humus that this town has managed to turn the tourist experience into a small medieval,

Hollywood

and legendary

transcript

. Today's Peñíscola exploits the past with seafaring grace and offers the visitor (which is numerous) events such as the International Comedy Film Festival, the Classical Theater, the International Jazz Festival or the Ancient and Baroque Music Festival. Then, to recharge your batteries, it offers you a wide range of gastronomic experiences, taking advantage of the excellent local cuisine. Here they have always eaten well, because their culinary habits are born in the straits and urgencies of the fishing boat. The Mediterranean provides delicacies such as

punxent caragol,

prawns, mussels or galleys, but also small treasures despised at first such as

sea

spardenya

, now considered a gastronomic treasure.

We are in the Casa Jaime restaurant, at the beginning of the long avenue of Papa Luna, which winds parallel to the main beach of the municipality. Jaime Sanz Senior, its founder, was a fisherman before opening his restaurant in 1967. In 1982 he established it in its current location, and now runs it alongside his son, Jaime Sanz Junior. The gastronomic emblem of the house is Calabuch rice, which was born as a domestic experiment. When it was first served to Berlanga, it still wasn't called that. The name was suggested by the director Jaime de Armiñán, in love with Peñíscola and married to Elena Santonja, the popular host of the pioneering TVE program

Con las manos en la masa.

Berlanga blessed the new recipe with his index finger (a casserole rice with

espardenyes

and sea nettles) and, as if it were a new Papa Luna, he spread it

urbi et orbi

to the admiration of an already unstoppable mass of tourists.

With all these charms, it is not strange that a town that barely reaches 8,000 registered inhabitants turns into a charismatic territory facing the sea in high season.

Berlanga, Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, Daenerys de la Tormenta… Peñíscola, beached ship always ready to set sail, awaits us.

Joan Garí is the author of 'València.

Els habitants del riu '.

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